Essential Eight Cyber Security
Improve your cyber security baseline and reduce ransomware risk with an Essential Eight uplift aligned to Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) guidance. We help Australian businesses assess their current posture, prioritise improvements, and implement practical controls across Microsoft 365, endpoints, and backups.
What is the Essential Eight?
The Essential Eight is a set of eight mitigation strategies published by the ACSC to help organisations prevent, detect, and recover from common cyber attacks. It focuses on high-impact controls that reduce the likelihood of compromise and limit the impact of incidents such as ransomware.
Why Essential Eight matters
Most successful attacks exploit familiar gaps: unpatched systems, excessive administrative access, weak authentication, or poor recoverability. Essential Eight provides a structured approach to reduce attack surface, strengthen identity security, and ensure you can restore operations quickly if something goes wrong.
The Essential Eight strategies
- Application Control: Prevent unauthorised applications from running and reduce the ability of malware to execute.
- Patch Applications: Keep commonly targeted applications (browsers, Microsoft Office, PDF readers and more) up to date to close known vulnerabilities.
- Configure Microsoft Office Macro Settings: Control or block macros to reduce a common pathway used to deliver malware and ransomware.
- User Application Hardening: Harden user-facing applications (such as web browsers and email clients) to reduce exposure to risky content and behaviours.
- Restrict Administrative Privileges: Limit admin access and apply least privilege to reduce the impact of credential theft and lateral movement.
- Patch Operating Systems: Ensure operating systems are updated in a timely, consistent manner across workstations and servers.
- Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): Require MFA for key services and remote access to significantly reduce account takeover risk.
- Regular Backups: Implement secure, tested backups with appropriate retention to enable fast, reliable recovery from incidents.
Essential Eight maturity levels
Essential Eight is commonly assessed against maturity levels. In general terms:
- Maturity Level 0: Control is not implemented or inconsistent
- Maturity Level 1: Baseline implementation for common threats
- Maturity Level 2: Broader, stronger implementation across the environment
- Maturity Level 3: Highest maturity for more capable, targeted threats
We recommend a target maturity level based on your risk profile, industry requirements, and operational needs.
Our Essential Eight service
- Assessment: Review your environment and identify gaps across identity, endpoints, patching, privileged access, and backups.
- Roadmap: Provide a prioritised plan outlining what to fix first, why it matters, and the practical steps to uplift.
- Implementation: Deploy the agreed controls and hardening changes with a structured change approach to minimise disruption.
- Ongoing verification: Optional reporting and continuous improvement to help maintain alignment as your environment changes.
What you receive
- Essential Eight gap assessment and findings summary
- Maturity target recommendation
- Prioritised remediation roadmap
- Implementation plan and change approach
- Post-uplift validation and documentation
- Optional ongoing reporting and management
Who this is for
- Australian businesses seeking a proven cyber security baseline
- Organisations using Microsoft 365 and Windows endpoints
- Teams focused on reducing ransomware risk and improving recovery readiness
- Businesses responding to customer or vendor security requirement